Gillian Hughes on James Hogg: A Life

Robert Burns has his monument on Edinburgh's Calton Hill, and Sir Walter Scott sits enthroned in what looks like the spire of an otherwise submerged Gothic cathedral on the edge of Princes Street Gardens but, as Karl Miller has pointed out, there is no monument to James Hogg in Edinburgh. In print too, Burns and Scott are inescapable presences in any bookshop with a 'Scottish Interest' section, while Hogg tends to be represented sparsely, if at all, by one or other of the recent paperback editions of his best-known novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Some Scots and many English people may barely recognise the name of the man whose approaching death was mentioned in the Glasgow Courier in November 1835 as that of 'our National Bard'. In his own time Hogg was sometimes too easily dismissed as the 'boozing buffoon' of the popular talking-heads tavern sessions (entitled the Noctes Ambrosianae) of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and more recently as a one-book wonder because of the Confessions, a brilliantly innovative double-narrative novel of demonic haunting and psychological malaise that slots neatly into the Scottish canon as a predecessor of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

James Hogg

As more of his work comes back into print, that is beginning to change. Hogg is resuming his rightful place as one of the greatest Scottish Romantics, standing alongside rather than several steps behind the titanic figures of Burns and Scott. His take on Scottish life was an unusual one—as his pen-name of 'the Ettrick Shepherd' indicates, he was from a traditional labouring-class background and worked on various farms in the Scottish Borders and in Dumfriesshire as a shepherd until almost the age of forty. When Hogg writes about political strife or actual warfare it is often from the perspective of the countryfolk who have little say in shaping the grand affairs of state but who nevertheless have to suffer the consequences. And if you want to know what shepherding was really like two hundred years ago, forget the genteel pastoral poem and go for Hogg's essay 'Storms' in The Shepherd's Calendar, which recounts his personal experiences of being out on the hills in a blizzard risking his life as he tries to save his flock from being smothered by a snowdrift—stirring stuff!

In recent years I've been working on a complete edition of Hogg's letters—two volumes have now been published by Edinburgh University Press with the third and final one now in preparation. Hogg is a wonderful letter-writer, and the variety of his correspondents is astonishing: from Prime Minister Robert Peel and literary giants Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron to local shepherds, farmers, and shop-keepers. He is often amusing and sometimes outrageous but never dull. On one occasion, for instance, he asked the prestigious London publisher John Murray to look out for a moneyed wife for him, as 'I daresay there is many a romantic girl about London who would think it a fine ploy to become a Yarrow shepherdess'. Wanting to compile an anthology of verses by the most celebrated poets of the day, Hogg opened a correspondence with Lord Byron in a letter which began, 'You will wonder at seeing a letter from the banks of Yarrow with the name of a stranger at the bottom of it, and you will wonder more I believe at the request that stranger makes of you'.

Hogg's autobiography, the 'Memoir of the Author's Life' published in his Altrive Tales of 1832, begins with an unexpectedly open confession of vanity, 'I like to write about myself: in fact, there are few things which I like better; it is so delightful to call up old reminiscences'. Hogg's own account of his life, however, conceals as much as it reveals and while it is an important source of biographical information James Hogg: A Life also gives due weight to Hogg's letters, the recollections and correspondence of his contemporaries, and information drawn from newspapers and periodicals.

The public perception of Hogg has always been that of the Ettrick Bard, originally generated in the poem that made him famous, The Queen's Wake of 1813. In this poem, which describes a contest of minstrels at the court of Mary, Queen of Scots for a prize harp the Ettrick Bard wears the clothes of an impoverished shepherd and his motto Naturae Donum, Nature's Gift, aligns him with Burns and a long train of 'natural geniuses'. His intelligence, his drive, and his persistent and successful efforts to educate himself were all concealed behind the figure of this heaven-inspired naïve rustic. Hogg's correspondence demonstrates that he was in fact extremely astute in dealing with the polite literary world of Edinburgh (and indeed of London) and with publishers like Archibald Constable, William Blackwood, and John Murray.

Throughout his writing career Hogg presented himself as the Ettrick Shepherd, though he became a middle-class professional author. Although his monumental financial incompetence involved him in a lifelong struggle with debt he earned a comfortable professional income by his pen in the later years of his life. He built himself a fine house which was eventually extended to comprise ten rooms and included a small study and neighbouring library for his own use. His society was courted by the local gentry, and his home of Altrive Lake in Yarrow came to be a tourist attraction in his final years.

Hogg also tended to elide from his autobiography those passages in his life which he found painful or uncomfortable to contemplate and which he regarded as private matters into which the reading public had no right to intrude. As he declared in his weekly essay-periodical The Spy of 1810-1811, when commenting on the people, places, and events of Edinburgh as the anonymous Mr Spy, 'though I am bound to tell the truth, I am not bound to tell the whole truth'. It has only recently been established, for example, that when he was living in Dumfriesshire between 1805 and 1809 he fathered two illegitimate daughters. The autobiography of this open-hearted and amusingly vain soul, in other words, is a polished exercise in self-presentation by an experienced and accomplished professional writer.

James Hogg: A Life reveals Hogg as a more complicated figure than he has hitherto appeared to be. This new chronological biography charts his progression from ragged boy cowherd to professional writer, carefully relating his writing to the events of his life and it illustrated by appropriate period engravings. Some interesting contradictions and unexpected connections are made. The mainstay of the Tory Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, for example, was mixing in decidedly Radical circles when he first came to live in Edinburgh, one which included schoolmasters, printers, and women—what might be described as a vigorous counter-culture to the elite world of Scott, Jeffrey, and Cockburn. As the guest of his friend John Wilson in September 1814 he passed his holidays among the Lake poets, whom he sincerely admired but also mocked, noting the tendency of this coterie to take themselves all too seriously, 'singing out their poetry in a loud sonorous key, which was very impressive but perfectly ludicrous'. When he visited London for the first and only time in his life, at the start of 1832, he relished being the lion of the social season, shown off 'like any other wild beast' in West End drawing-rooms that were 'as full as ever you saw sheep in a fold', yet he escaped to the London markets to look at the varieties of different fish on sale and to ponder the sad fate of the skylarks piled in hundreds ready to be baked in pies instead of flying free above his and their native hills.

James Hogg: A Life describes the experiences and personality of a fascinating writer with an unique perspective on the literary culture of the Romantic Age. Idolising Burns as a role model and loving Scott as a loyal friend and kindly benefactor, Hogg does indeed stand between them both.

Gillian Hughes